Photo Tours.

This paper describes an effort to automatically create ``tours'' of thousands of the world's landmarks from geo-tagged user-contributed photos on the Internet. These photo tours take you through each site's most popular viewpoints on a tour that maximizes visual quality and traversal efficiency. This planning problem is framed as a form of the Traveling Salesman Problem on a graph with photos as nodes and transition costs on edges and pairs of edges, permitting efficient solution even for large graphs containing thousands of photos. Our approach is highly scalable and is the basis for the Photo Tours feature in Google Maps, which can be viewed at http://maps.google.com/phototours.